As the editor of a series of essays Lingard remembered (2004) and in articles in Recusant History and elsewhere, Peter Phillips has demonstrated his credentials as the leading living authority on the great English Catholic historian, John Lingard (1771–1851). Although some of the material here had appeared previously in print, with this highly scholarly and substantial study and handsomely produced and illustrated volume, Phillips has thoroughly secured those credentials. Other scholars, notably Edwin Jones (in John Lingard and the pursuit of historical truth), Rosemary Mitchell (in Picturing the past) and John Vidmar (in English Catholic historians and the English Reformation) have recently highlighted aspects of Lingard's reputation as a historian, but Phillips's is the most thorough and rounded assessment of his life and work as a whole. Within a well-organised chronological narrative, stretching from Lingard's childhood and time as a young seminarian, factotum and seminary teacher at Douai and then Crook Hall and Ushaw, encompassing controversial spats with Anglican divines such as Henry Phillpotts as well as the harassment that he suffered from within the Catholic community by the irascible Bishop Milner, and through the several harmonious decades which he spent as a dedicated parish priest at Hornby, near Lancaster, the author presents a sophisticated and nuanced thematic analysis of Lingard's thought, ideas and writings: his acute analysis of the historical and liturgical writings, as well as the more everyday details of his life including his foreign travels, is based on impressively rich archival and manuscript as well printed documentary sources.

Like the subject of his biography, Phillips leaves no stone unturned. The humanity and modesty of the reserved but good-humoured and kindly ‘finished gentleman’ at home, entertaining friends and neighbours in his ‘well furnished’ house at Hornby, and his delight in children and pets, emerges. Lingard turned down several offers of ecclesiastical preferment, even the possible offer of being made a cardinal in petto by Pope Leo xii in 1829, in order not to be deflected from his life's work of historical research and writing. There are some delightful vignettes from his daily routine, while Lingard's character sketches of some of his more well-known contemporaries are pleasingly related. For all their public theological disputing, Lingard was charmed by Robert Southey and was on calling terms with the friend of his publisher Joseph Mawman, the future influential bishop of Chester and London, Charles James Blomfield, while Blomfield was rector of St Botolph's, Aldgate. However, in sharp contrast to his former Ushaw pupil, the future Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster Nicholas Wiseman, Lingard seems to have harboured early suspicions of Newman and the Tractarians. He derided as pretentious nonsense the ‘Puseyite’ claims of the Tracts for the times that the Church of England had preserved a true catholic and apostolic continuity and used a series of powerful articles in the Dublin Review in the mid-1840s to explode such pretensions. He doubted the validity of Anglican orders: this was on grounds of a lack of due spiritual authority regardless of the question of the validity of the form of ordination.

Moreover, Lingard did not spare those Tractarian converts who, with Newman, became Oratorians. Exuding an almost eighteenth-century disdain for the ‘fancy’ and ‘enthusiasm’ of both those who remained and those who came over to Rome, Lingard privately informed his friend Canon John Walker of Scarborough in 1848 that ‘there appears to me a superabundance of wordiness and dreaminess in all the writings of the Oxford tractarians, whether they come over to us or not. They torment me dreadfully, for they never come to the real point, but are always preparing for it’. It would be necessary, Lingard suggested, for Newman's ‘zeal’ to be carefully directed and kept in check. For he disliked ‘the self-sufficiency of these English Philipnerists’, who were in danger of ‘carrying with them all the false notions which they had imbibed at Oxford’ (p. 411). Phillips shows that Lingard's liturgical writings and translations into the vernacular (notably his Manual of prayer on Sundays and during mass) need to be taken seriously and reveals his enduring link with the concerns of the ‘Cisalpine’ thinkers of the eighteenth century. Lingard ‘sought a liturgy that would be clearly understood by his little congregation at Hornby and offer no stumbling-block to Protestant visitors’ (p. 309). Simplicity and clarity were his guiding aims. Such concerns, sometimes expressed in disapproval of the emotional excesses of the Marian spirituality characteristic of new converts such as Faber and of Wiseman himself, as in his private criticism of the Litany of Loretto as ‘unintelligible nonsense’, could create tensions. Lingard, however, was sensitive to likely criticism on such matters and readily withdrew from internal Catholic controversy at the first signs of trouble. Phillips makes clear the depth and intensity of Lingard's own spirituality and notes that he would have appreciated the irony of his own hymn, ‘Hail Queen of heaven’, being preserved at the heart of the English Catholic tradition as testament to his memory. While conceding that Lingard's earlier work can be located within a loosely English Catholic ‘Cisalpine’, if not ‘Enlightenment’ historical tradition (his debt to Hume and Gibbon is acknowledged), Phillips somewhat modifies this received view by ultimately defining him as a transition figure from the eighteenth-century ‘Cisalpine’ Catholic world to the more self-confident tone redolent of the ‘Ultramontane’ apologetics of the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church: significantly some of his earlier writings such as on the Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church (1806) and the first edition of his History of England (1819) were subtly modified, as well as enriched by new evidence, to reflect this broad trend. Phillips's verdict on Lingard as historian is conclusive: ‘His intention in writing his History of England, was to provide the reader with a narrative of political events and, without ostentation, to seek to reconfigure the received (Protestant) reading of English history. He wished to bring a new approach to England's past, reintegrating Catholicism into the heart of English history’ (p. 151). Lingard succeeded. He was a pioneer in the long struggle to question, if not overturn, the ‘Whig interpretation of history’.